Wednesday, 22 January 2014

DELHI IS NOT INDIA

I understood this simple truism during my days in DD news,
posted in Delhi, when some of my colleagues and friends from my batch, posted
in various states told me that we in Delhi kept on doing Delhi centric stories
and passed it on as national news. I later realized that they are absolutely
correct.

The entire press coverage of Kejriwal’s agitation in Delhi is
bizarre by any stretch of the imagination. It is really at best a local Delhi
issue and people in other states could not be bothered by it. A recent nation
wide poll revealed that people beyond Delhi and Haryana don’t really care about
Arvind Kejriwal. They have far more pressing things to deal with on their
plate. It’s also easy for the news channels to keep focusing on live coverage
in Delhi because frankly it’s a low cost alternative for them and also an
opportunity for what I call lazy reporting. When is the last time I saw a
decent report from say Chhattisgarh or the Line of control?